This invention relates to personal care compositions, and in particular to personal care compositions that provide enhanced sun protection.
Personal care compositions have a wide range of applications, from sunscreens to cosmetics. Because of their broad use, particularly in sunscreens, it is desirable to provide personal care compositions with improved properties such as enhanced sun protection factor (SPF). In fact, enhanced SPF is of increasing importance in other market segments such as hair care, lipsticks, foundations, mascaras, moisturizers, skin lightening, and anti-aging creams and lotions. Claimed SPFs usually range from 2 to 4 up to 50 to 70.
One of the disadvantages of the current state of the art is that many sunscreens, most notably organic sunscreens, can lead to skin irritation. This skin irritation may be attributable to the active components in those particular applications. Thus, merely increasing the loading of the active components in order to obtain enhanced SPF may be precluded. The Food and Drug Administration imposed upper limits on the amounts of sunscreening agents in personal care applications. Further, certain sunscreening agents need to be precoated or undergo a pre-processing step prior to being used in personal care applications.
There accordingly remains a need in the art for personal care compositions that have enhanced properties in various applications without the increase of active components that can lead to skin irritation. Further, there is a demand in the art for personal care compositions that can be manufactured using materials that does not need to be pre-coated or undergo any other pre-processing step.